While there is a large number of Content Management Systems (CMS) to choose from, few CMS platforms are more popular and more widely used than WordPress and Joomla. Some wrongly believe that Joomla and WordPress are popular simply because they are the oldest. In reality they are neither the oldest nor the pioneers of the CMS space. In fact, there are plenty of CMS platforms that existed before the turn of the millennium. WordPress didn’t rear its head until 2003, and Joomla didn’t show up until around 2005.

The popularity of either platform is largely due to its ease of use. The birth of the widely accepted open source CMS has given millions of users all around the power to create their own dynamic websites. Even some giant brands have turned to open source content management to streamline the web content management process.

In this post, we aim to give you the information you need to make the decision between the Joomla or WordPress CMS.

Basic search engine optimization (SEO) is fundamental. And essential. SEO will help you position your website properly to be found at the most critical points in the buying process or when people need your site.

What are search engines looking for? How can you build your website in a way that will please both your visitors/customers, as well as Google, Bing, and other search engines? Most importantly, how can SEO help your web presence become more profitable?

During the Introduction to SEO session at SES New York, Carolyn Shelby (@CShel), Director of SEO, Chicago Tribune/435 Digital, fully explained the extreme value SEO can deliver to a site, and stressed the importance of basic SEO using the following analogy:

What is SEO, Exactly?

The goal of foundational SEO isn’t to cheat or “game” the search engines. The purpose of SEO is to:

Create a great, seamless user experience.

Communicate to the search engines your intentions so they can recommend your website for relevant searches.

Google wants website owners to add as much structured data to their sites as possible in order to improve its search results and Knowledge Graph boxes with rich snippets like event listings, reviews and other information. Adding this kind of metadata to a site, however, isn’t always trivial, and many small businesses don’t really have the expertise to add microdata orRDFa markup to their sites.

Starting today, however, you won’t have to fiddle with your code to report this data to Google. The company’s new Data Highlighter now offers a point-and-click tool for tagging your site to its specifications without having to touch any code.

For the time being, this tool is only available in English and only for structured data about events like concerts, sporting events, and exhibitions. Google promises to expand this project to other data types and languages in “the months ahead.”

To get started, you just have to go to Google’s Webmaster Tools and start tagging their site. Here is a short video with step-by-step instructions for how to get started:

Since early 2011 when they updated their Panda algorithm, Google has concentrated its efforts to making sure that people have an enjoyable and productive experience when surfing the internet. Although this update was helpful to many quality websites, it has devastating effects to millions of webmasters worldwide. With their rankings destroyed and web traffic at an all-time low, many people had to review their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies and seek help from professional companies to help them recover from the crippling effects of the Google Panda. Hardly a year after the dreaded Panda update, Google stepped up its anti-spam campaign by updating another major search engine algorithm, the Penguin, which came with is fair share of surprises. Webmasters who want their blogs or websites to rank higher in organic search results and enjoy traffic must conform to its stipulations.

There are many schools of thought and methodologies defining what inbound marketing should look like. Most of them position content marketing, social media marketing and SEO as the core of inbound marketing. From a 20,000-foot view, this has definite merit. However, with the right technology, enough content, well-developed personae and a good understanding of the brand, inbound marketing strategy can be much more stratified and robust.

The anatomy of a robust inbound marketing campaign has similarities to the human spine. The human spine has five ordered sections – cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacrum and coccyx – all of which are required to be in working order to live a pain-free, normal and productive life.

An inbound marketing strategy has five ordered sections, too – owned and earned media, landing pages, lead nurturing, sales interaction and retention. And all of them are required to widen the sales funnel, create acceleration through it and to optimize Marketing’s impact on revenue. If there’s a problem with any of the sections Marketing’s impact on revenue will not be optimized and the inbound campaign will be in poor health.

At Pubcon Las Vegas on Tuesday (10/16), Google’s Matt Cutts announced a new tool to disavow links . After absorbing the news for a day, I have some advice – put down the keyboard and the Red Bull and breathe. Breathe in, breathe out, and then repeat.

As Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility, and my rice turns out Perfect Every Time®” – or something like that. My SEO friends are already reporting that their customers are asking to have links removed, and this has the potential to get ugly fast. I think this is, on balance, a good tool (one particularly handsome SEO petitioned Google for atext-file-based disavow back in December of 2011), but it also has the potential for serious destruction.

I. Who Should Use It?

Often when I complete a keyword research project for a client, they ask me about keywords I may not have included, or they want to know what the relative competition on the keywords looks like. This happens often enough that I thought I would remind everyone that while research for SEO and PPC can go hand in hand, they’re actually very different.

First, think about what your goals are with each medium. What are you trying to do, and what constitutes success in that area? Next, think about how the keywords will be used. Where, when, how often?

Finally, consider what your margin for error is. If you don’t get exactly the right keyword, what’s the penalty?

We all know that backlinking is essential for SEO success. I outlined this in my article about off page SEO. However, there are still a couple of backlinking mistakes committed by people worldwide which is costing them dearly in search engine rankings, traffic and most importantly, revenue.

1. No Anchor Text

This is the most basic principle of a good backlink. If you want your backlink to help your website rank for a certain keyword, then the keyword must be in the anchor text of that backlink. For example, if the main keyword of your website was “designer wedding clothes”, then the text which should be included in your backlink should be “designer wedding clothes.”

2. Linking To The Wrong Page

This follows on from the previous back-linking mistake. It also emphasizes the importance of choosing to target 1 keyword per page. For example, if you have a webpage which is optimized for the keyword “designer wedding shoes” then all the back-links with the keyword in the anchor text should be sent to that page. Don’t send it to your home page or any other page. Sounds simple and logical, but so many people forget about this.

Over the years, SEOs have employed many techniques to control how their site appears in search results. These included:

Writing compelling Title Tags 65-75 characters long

Descriptive Meta Descriptions

Use of NOODP and NOYDIR meta tags

Keyword rich URLs

By controlling how our snippets appear in search results, we could greatly improve our click-through rates and the amount of free traffic we saw.

But times are changing. For better or worse, Google has now stepped up its title tag rewriting algorithm so that webmasters can no longer predict how their title tags will display. This major bummer that is only compensated by the fact that Google has given us something much better in the form of rich snippets.